Skull Cracker pushed at an open (jail) door

THE FRIDAY THING: PRISON clearly does not mean prison any more. In years gone by thugs, murderers, rapists and the like were locked away both to punish them for their lawless activities and to protect the rest of us.

So what has changed?

Take the case of violent Michael Wheatley (otherwise fetchingly known as Skull Cracker, which should, perhaps have given someone in charge an inkling that he should have been kept in jail for our welfare rather than his own), who absconded from an open prison.

Skull Cracker was, rather ludicrously, given 13 life sentences by the courts. Quite how you can be detained for 13 life spans defies all common sense. If that isn’t enough to make you think our entire legal system is like something out of Alice in Wonderland, Mr Skull Cracker was then allowed out of prison, either to find someone else’s skull to fracture or to do a bit of shopping, thieving or whatever else took his fancy.

But Mr Cracker is not on his own. Apparently inmates from open prisons abscond at the rate of one every other day. More than 580 criminals, including many murderers simply walked out of jail. Staggeringly, 18 who have escaped since May 2010 are still missing...

Doesn’t exactly help you to sleep easy in your bed at night does it?